Wartime in the Pacific Northwest
"Halt! Who Goes There?" Through His Loudspeaker a Night Guard Challenges
Strangers
Prowlers and all others, so challenged, must give the recognition sign. This armed watchman is among
the sentinels at a Washington hydroelectric plant. In dead earnest, now, all big plants are guarded against
saboteurs.
but to go overseas and punish those pagans
who attacked us first.
Crowded Cities Throb to Supreme War
Efforts
Big cities everywhere now swing to the
rhythm of war.
But the Pacific Northwest-so near new
Alaskan Army and Navy bases, and with
food, timber, many raw materials, and electric
power so plentiful-hums now to a prodigious
boom of unpredictable significance. Today
this fairly new country that used to thrive on
fish, fruit, and fresh-cut lumber sees its former
ways of life utterly upset.
By tens of thousands, men have quit what
they were doing yesterday and now hold jobs
in the new mushroom wartime shops.
"What's going to happen," some ask, "when
fighting stops? Can the Northwest go back
to fish, fruit, and sawmills, or have these
changes come to stay?"
Whatever the answer, sufficient unto the
day is the adventure thereof.
For Seattle, the Klondike gold rush itself
was a quiet, sleepy event compared with to
day's unparalleled excitement.
Workers pour in by scores of thousands.
"Where can we eat and sleep? What about
laundry, and transportation to and from work?
What makes food so high?"
New bombers, pursuit planes, merchant
ships, long barges for landing invasion troops,
welded tanks, mine sweepers and mine layers;
destroyers, seaplane tenders, crash boats, car
riers and transports made by converting
freighters; uniforms, sleeping bags by the
thousands, knockdown houses for use in
Alaska; skis, dog sleds, and dog harness; gas
mask fillers, incendiary-bomb casings; car
tridge clips, preserved foods, propellers; ma
rine steering engines by hundreds for ships
being built all over the United States-these
are but a few of the things now made here.
At one city are ocean piers two and a half
miles long, among the world's longest.
Graving docks are the largest in Allied
hands on the whole Pacific.
No housewife is astonished if, rising some
morning to get breakfast, she finds Army tents
in her back yard and soldiers setting up anti
aircraft guns or inflating a barrage balloon.
"My jittery hens quit laying," said one
woman, "when soldiers turned on that search
light; it kept the chickens awake all night . . .
And that balloon! Our calf took one look
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